Storage drives or disks provide an easy, fast, and convenient way for backing up or storing data. As additional backups are made, additional disks and disk space are required. However, disks or storage drives add costs to any backup solution including the costs of the disks themselves, costs associated with powering and cooling the disks, and costs associated with physically storing the disks in the datacenter. Thus, it becomes desirable to maximize the usage of disk storage available on each disk.
One method of maximizing storage on a disk is to use some form of data deduplication techniques. Data deduplication is a data compression technique for eliminating redundant data. In an existing deduplication process, first data is compared to stored data to detect duplicates, that is, to identify or determine whether the first data is unique or not. Next, when the first data is identified as not being unique, the redundant first data is eliminated and replaced with a small reference that points to the stored data. However, prior existing technologies only perform data deduplication by comparing the data present in the same storage volume. Unfortunately, prior existing technologies fail to perform data deduplication across different storage volumes.